Lauretta Hendricks Backus, who taught art at Lawrence Public Schools for 18 years, is the featured artist in the Lawrence ArtWalk, which opens Saturday.

The work of Lauretta Hendricks Backus reflects her experience working with young students. She describes her paintings as having a

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When you’re an art teacher in public schools, you have to learn a little about a lot of different types of art.

One day, you might be teaching ceramics. The next, drawing. Then, photography.

“Art teachers do everything,” says Lauretta Hendricks Backus.

She should know. She worked for Lawrence Public Schools for 18 years at various schools, with various age groups.

And while Hendricks Backus retired from teaching three years ago, she figures she’ll never escape the effects working with children have had on her art.

“It totally influenced my art,” she says. “It looks like caricatures of paintings, or just kid paintings. They have a primitive, childlike quality. They’re not as sophisticated as some people’s art.”

That was OK – at least in the eyes of the Lawrence ArtWalk. Its jury selected Hendricks Backus as the featured artist for this year’s walk, which is Saturday and Oct. 28.

“I quite personally like her work,” says John Wysocki, the ArtWalk’s director. “I like the bright colors and the looseness of the brushwork. Things like the fish image we used (on the ArtWalk’s advertising postcard) look woodsy.”

Artistic adaptations

Hendricks Backus graduated from KU with a degree in painting and focused on her artwork while waiting tables for a few years after graduation.

Eventually, she decided to go back to school to get her art education degree.

Now that her teaching career is over – in part because she has multiple sclerosis – she’s able to focus on her artwork again.

In the past Hendricks Backus did mostly oil paintings that used abstract shapes in various textures and colors.

Now, she’s making the transition to acrylics, because there are fewer fumes to breathe. She’s also painting more concrete figures – a series on fish and another on insects are included in that mix.

She used to have her students draw and paint fish in class.

“It’s easier to do a fish,” she says, comparing figures with her abstract paintings. “A lot of things are answered for you.”

She also finds fish and bugs more marketable than shapes.

Marketability also has caused her to branch out from just painting – something she’s able to do because of her background in art education.

“At art fairs, people are always looking for coffee mugs and earrings, so I started making coffee mugs and earrings,” she says. “I can lure them into my booth to look at my paintings.”

She also has done other types of pottery.

Trash or treasure

In addition to having her fish painting featured on the 2007 Lawrence ArtWalk postcard, Hendricks Backus will be honored during a reception and poster signing from 7 p.m.-9 p.m. Friday at Wink Eyewear, 806 Mass.

There are more than 50 participants in this year’s ArtWalk who will be on hand at 34 locations throughout Lawrence and the area. Wysocki says about a fourth of the artists are new to the ArtWalk.

“That makes it fresh, I suppose,” he says. “It’s a combination of having a sales opportunity and just showing their work to the public in an intimate or personalized setting. Artists get to control their display environments as opposed to just handing off their work to a gallery.”

Hendricks Backus says she’s excited for the opportunity, and she’s also a bit nervous. There are a lot of good artists in Lawrence, and because of her simple style, she often hears one comment in particular at art fairs: “I could do that.”

But that doesn’t bother her.

“One man’s trash,” she says, “is another man’s treasure.”